We’re going to start planning 2021 tonight. Amazing really after the fruitless exercise of planning 2020. I’ve hardly looked at the big year planner wall-chart I bought this time last year.
It’s not even on the wall anymore, the only things that continued to happen were the annual due dates for insurances, tax that kind of thing.
I bought my 2021 planner a few weeks ago. For some reason I thought I’d get one half the size of this year’s perhaps to reflect my lowering expectations.
This year’s planning exercise will be more about when Mrs Jones takes her eight weeks off next year as opposed to deciding where we’re going so it should be more straightforward.
Having postponed one holiday and shortened another – and lost a bit of cash in doing so – we’re in no mood to book anything any time soon.
The big question that no one knows the answer to is when is this all going to end. There is all this talk of a hard winter but then some hope that the second wave will be done and dusted by the Spring.
On the other hand some people think the whole of 2021 will be blighted, social distancing and mask wearing will continue and all the scars of 2020 will change our behaviour even if virus numbers stay low.
I feel more positive, I think we’ll see case numbers plateau this side of Christmas and that hospitalisations and deaths will stay at normal levels for this time of year.
Once that happens people will tire of lockdown and normal life will resume more quickly than we now imagine. I think of how people predicted that the airline industry would never recover post 9/11 yet a few months we were all flying again.
I hope I’m right but only time will tell as it always does. In a way it’s presumptuous to even assume that we’ll be hear at all.
I’ve found planning holidays a surprisingly difficult process. Mrs Jones has to consider others she works with, I like to work round big sporting events, then there’s avoiding school holidays when travel is more expensive and thinking about the weather in potential destinations.
There’s also the art of making the most of the so-called bank holidays. Apparently by tactically taking time off around national public holidays – 24 days leave can be turned into 53. Trouble is almost all of those are at the more expensive times to travel.
For ease this year I guess we’ll try to repeat what didn’t happen this year, we’ve already earmarked mid-November for our cancelled Caribbean break.
With the dates in the diary we’ll have to be prepared to move quickly when the time comes as the rush to book holidays will be like nothing we’ve ever seen with all the pent up demand that’s out there.